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"There are freedoms and opportunities in the technical industry that are not as readily available in other trades and professions. These freedoms and opportunities are left largely untapped by the millions employed in this industry. What are these freedoms? What are these opportunities? [...]
Programmers, developers, solution architects, and technical consultants—all of you have the basic skills necessary to become highly successful outside the confines of traditional employment. You have to take on the activities of a businessperson. This is easier than it may seem; it is a natural progression from where you are today, and one which will pay immense dividends."
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"As a leader, you cannot motivate anyone. What you can do is cultivate a workplace where it is more likely for someone to experience optimal motivation.
Optimal motivation means having the positive energy, vitality, and sense of well-being required to sustain the pursuit and achievement of meaningful goals while flourishing. Optimal motivation is the result of satisfying three basic psychological needs that lie at the heart of every human being's ability to thrive: autonomy, relatedness, and competence.
Why care if people are optimally motivated? Optimal motivation fuels employee work passion. Actively engaged employees have positive intentions to stay and endorse your organization, use discretionary effort and organizational citizenship behaviors on behalf of the organization, and perform above expected standards."
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"If you're reading this article, your efforts to solve your busyness problem have probably not paid off. As a result, you're probably feeling frustrated. Or worse—you feel like a failure.
Why can't you stop procrastinating?
Why can't you get more done?
Why isn't your inbox under control?
The truth is that the problem is not you. It is how you are trying to overcome your busyness that is the problem."
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"Everything you know about time-management is wrong. [...]
Why?
For two reasons...
The first is that almost everything we read about time-management is logical. It's typically the same types of tired advice that we hear. 'Try this new app,' we say. Or 'follow this organization system.' And you've probably been told a hundred times, 'plan out your week on Sunday night and put some letters by your key tasks.'
But time-management isn't just logical. Today especially, it's emotional."
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"All businesses care about quality ideas: the new product they want to develop or the new market they want to exploit. Self-made billionaires are no different in their emphasis on ideas, but that is where the similarity ends. Traditional businesses often organize so that their individual functions specialize in one area of endeavor. The goal is to operate with optimum efficiency and to avoid conflict between groups and individuals who think differently from each other. As a result, people who are responsible for developing ideas work separately from the people who are responsible for bringing them to market. Product developers work separately from the manufacturing department; manufacturing is separate from marketing and sales, etc. There are logical reasons for this kind of separation, but the consequence so often is that even the best ideas are subject to compromise as they move from development to market. The qualities that make that idea new or great get watered down in the process of going live, and the original idea developer is rarely involved or influential enough to protect and optimize the qualities that make the idea good in the first place.
Self-made billionaires, by contrast, view execution as a creative act that is inextricable from the idea itself."
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